WASHINGTON: And it looks like Courtney Love is airing out old grudges against Brad Pitt involving ‘Fight Club’.
According to Variety, a US-based news outlet, Courtney Love joined Marc Maron for an interview on the “WTF” podcast and said that David Fincher hired her to star opposite Brad Pitt and Edward Norton in 1999’s ‘Fight Club.’
Love said she earned the role of Marla Singer, who was later played by Helena Bonham Carter in the film. At the time, the “Hole” frontwoman had just returned from seeing “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” which had received rave reviews. According to Love, she was sacked from “Fight Club” after rejecting Brad Pitt’s offer for a Kurt Cobain film.
Love claimed she “went nuclear” on Pitt after he and director Gus Van Sant approached her about a Kurt Cobain biopic. Love and Cobain married in 1992 and remained together until his death at the age of 27 in 1994. Van Sant finally completed “Last Days,” a Cobain-inspired drama starring Michael Pitt, but Love said this wasn’t the project Pitt and the director wanted her permission on.
“I wouldn’t let Brad play Kurt,” Love said. “I went nuclear. I don’t do Faust. Who the fuck do you think are?”
Love added that she told Pitt the following: “I don’t know if I trust you and I don’t know that your movies are for profit. They’re really good social justice movies, but…if you don’t get me, you kind of don’t get Kurt, and I don’t feel like you do, Brad.”
It was after rejecting Pitt’s Cobain movie that Love was then fired from “Fight Club,” she said. According to Love, Norton broke the news to her. The two were romantic partners at the time.
“He starts sobbing,” Love told Maron. “And he was like, ‘I don’t have the power!'”
A Variety source confirmed that Love audited for the role in “Fight Club” but said she was not offered the part. “You cannot be fired for a job you didn’t get,” the source added. “It’s common knowledge that roles are not decided by other actors but by the director.”
Fincher apparently called Love later to confirm her exit from the film. In the film, which initially tanked at the box office but has since become one of Fincher’s most popular directorial efforts, Bonham Carter took over the part instead.
According to Deadline, ‘Fight Club’, directed by David Fincher and based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name, was released by 20th Century Fox in 1999.
The anarchic play follows a nameless, insomniac office worker (Norton) and the devil-may-care soap manufacturer Tyler Durden (Pitt) as they start an underground fight club that soon becomes much more.
Marla, Love’s would-be character, is the female lead of Fight Club and Durden’s love interest. (ANI)